Thank you for judging me without knowing it. I'm a 2nd (out of 3) year CS undergrad at Exeter, UK.
Last year I was shocked at the number of people that hadnt seena unix box, or written a line of code (or even HTML!), before starting. However there are, generalising, at least 3 groups in the 100 or so CS students here. One group hadn't got a clue about computers (and probably still dont), they are obviously in it for the money, and naturally have windows windows windows and think its good because it will get them lots of oney.
The 2nd group is the gamer group, they play their games constantly, and dont want too much effort doing it. These are the Pirated XP 0-day release types.
The final group (a tiny minority, and not too vocal either) are the people that care about computers, some run 100% linux, some have a windows partition on one of their computers to check websites work in IE, or play civ 3.
However I will say this about Exeter (and theres a lot here that applys to any UK uni over US uni as I see them):
1) Although it is technically possible to do a CS major, we dont do as diverse courses as in the U.S. This means that the first year is 100% Computer Science, the 2nd year is 7/8 CS, and one extra, which can be Netowrking. 3RD is similar (with 1 module being 8 weeks "inerning" over the summer).
Our course especially concentrates on the science. Getting a decent algorithm, and implementing that. Nothing about anything language specific (we do java, but the techniques are easily aplyable to any OO language and a traditional language (wuth some hard work).
We do learn about memory managment and machine level stuff, not for the ix86, but for a MIPS 5000 or something horible:)
But the most important thing is we develop in java, can use any programs we want (vim, notepad, jbuilder [windows or linux], forte etc), as long as we get some code out.
Most lecture slides are given out in pdf or ps (probably as most of the full time lecturers use *nix exclusively). Occasionaly there is a ppt in there (use staroffice). Documents are given out in rtf format (changed from doc last summer after a small uproar from a few of us).
Everything is open, the lab computers are 2 rooms of redhat 6/nt4 dual boot (default to windows), one lab of solaris and one nt4 only 3D image stuff. We are encouraged to use whatever we want, providing we generate an (open format) document at the end of it.
From what I hear in the US, you dont get *nix on the machinces because you get "free" software from microsoft, most programing is done in VB, and half of your course is outside courses like biology!
Until they know that you always buy milk from your local store (which is cheaper then the store at work), so they inflate the price slowly to get more money out of you.
So I take it I cant keep my personal record of archived posts on certain newsgroups over the past few years because you didnt mean them to be archived.
Even countries withoput a histroy of blowung up nuclear plants (UK for example), there is the question of what to do with the waste. Canty bury it, it gets in the water supply, even with loads of lining. Cant dump it in the irish sea.
If you spend $100,000 on a house, whats wrong with adding another $500 for wiring (and $1500 for a 52" tv;) - doesnt make much of a difference in the long run.
We have 20m runs of svideo at the uni tv station no problem. If you're more interested in length though we've done 100+m runs of high quality microphone cable (for video, £1.40 a metre), and 5-m+ runs of cheap (15p/metre) common tv cable with a couple of bnc or composite ends stuck on.
We have a 300m rj6 crap quality cable with 2 20db boosters and a high output on the VTR at the start and another booster at the end (before a proper industry booster and splitter with another 200m run from there).
If you need more then a 50m (150 foot) single run in your new house I'm envious.
However its all very well dropping in whatever cables you need, think about how you are going to use them - do you really want them all arriving in your basement? Drop a lot more cable down to your living room, just in case.
Might be worthwhile sticking some cheap speaker wire or 2 core mains flex down there too - if you need a signal.
And finaly, whatever you come up with, double it. A video signal to each room is fine, until you want a tv in there, and a camera.
Yep, and you've just saved a mans life, are you really bothered about the $100 ticket?
However how about when the idiot behind you pulls in 3 inches from your rear bumper - you speed up to the limit + 5 to get away and you get fined. Great.
The big question...
on
Hacker U.
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It is very rare I dont get a full signal, indoors or outdoors, in a car, in a tunnel etc. Anywhere in the UK - be it a field in shropshire or the tower bridge.
The only place I have noticed my lack of signal, in the last 4 years, was in a gully with walls arround me, a near steep ice slope above & below me, and behind me about 500m to another hill.
When I got to the top I had a signal perfectly again.
I've just read every +2 post there is (8:15AM GMT 26/11), only one mentioned diplomacy, and that was in passing.
It is impossible to play a game of freeciv without diplomacy. I dont care if its as complex as civ 3's, or as rudimentry as the originals, if I cant make peace with my neighbour its not civilization, as my empire is not civilized. Even the mongols and huns didnt attack some empires, partly for their own survival. In freeciv you cant, you have no choice, its basicly a bloodlust.
I've played games of civ where I've never built an attacking unit until I roll out 30+ armors in one go, use my rail network to get them to the enemy lines, and take over the empire in an extremely speedy way (10 turns later and I've conquered almost africa and europe from aisa.
The declaration doesnt hold true for many laws in the US, and other countries.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
[uk anti terrorism arbitrary detention of suspects for 5 years with no evidence or appeal]
Article 11.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
[dimitry wassit - wasnt a crime where he commited the act, not sure if this applies]
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
[any media, including the internet, receive and impart information and ideas, including how to play a dvd without sing proprietry software]
Rugby is kind of like American Football, except tough. Theres no pamby helmets, no 5 foot thick shoulder pads, no 3 minutes breaks every 3 seconds. etc. etc. Just a pure blood bath.
Really? I'm looking at laser systems for broadcasting the campus TV to different buildings. http://www.canon-europa.com/products/network_produ cts/canobeam came up on my search, the network version operates up to 622Mbps, upto 1000m [depending on weather], or 156MBps upto 2000m. It works at 785nm (+-15).
Actually they can, just put a receiver in the beam:)
You'll notice it though, unless the receiver was small enough (a few cm's), and near the destination, to only get a small amount of the beam (which diverges by a lot at these distances). The intensity would be lowe rat the destination, but with a small enough bug it would be possible. The bug would have to be very sensitive though!
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for judging me without knowing it. I'm a 2nd (out of 3) year CS undergrad at Exeter, UK.
:)
Last year I was shocked at the number of people that hadnt seena unix box, or written a line of code (or even HTML!), before starting. However there are, generalising, at least 3 groups in the 100 or so CS students here. One group hadn't got a clue about computers (and probably still dont), they are obviously in it for the money, and naturally have windows windows windows and think its good because it will get them lots of oney.
The 2nd group is the gamer group, they play their games constantly, and dont want too much effort doing it. These are the Pirated XP 0-day release types.
The final group (a tiny minority, and not too vocal either) are the people that care about computers, some run 100% linux, some have a windows partition on one of their computers to check websites work in IE, or play civ 3.
However I will say this about Exeter (and theres a lot here that applys to any UK uni over US uni as I see them):
1) Although it is technically possible to do a CS major, we dont do as diverse courses as in the U.S. This means that the first year is 100% Computer Science, the 2nd year is 7/8 CS, and one extra, which can be Netowrking. 3RD is similar (with 1 module being 8 weeks "inerning" over the summer).
Our course especially concentrates on the science. Getting a decent algorithm, and implementing that. Nothing about anything language specific (we do java, but the techniques are easily aplyable to any OO language and a traditional language (wuth some hard work).
We do learn about memory managment and machine level stuff, not for the ix86, but for a MIPS 5000 or something horible
But the most important thing is we develop in java, can use any programs we want (vim, notepad, jbuilder [windows or linux], forte etc), as long as we get some code out.
Most lecture slides are given out in pdf or ps (probably as most of the full time lecturers use *nix exclusively). Occasionaly there is a ppt in there (use staroffice). Documents are given out in rtf format (changed from doc last summer after a small uproar from a few of us).
Everything is open, the lab computers are 2 rooms of redhat 6/nt4 dual boot (default to windows), one lab of solaris and one nt4 only 3D image stuff. We are encouraged to use whatever we want, providing we generate an (open format) document at the end of it.
From what I hear in the US, you dont get *nix on the machinces because you get "free" software from microsoft, most programing is done in VB, and half of your course is outside courses like biology!
Many computers have an extra 2 ports on the front for things like this.
Geeks will be going outdoors on a more than regular basis.
Fantasy world....
Until they know that you always buy milk from your local store (which is cheaper then the store at work), so they inflate the price slowly to get more money out of you.
You can opt out of these (or not opt in) by not accepting cookies, or not accepting them from places like doubleclick.
Grab the source, check your code. Don't trust downloadable binaries any farther than you can throw your computer.
Lets assume that you do, do you really have the time to check every line of code in wuftpd, or sendmail, or the kernel, or any other download?
All it would take is transparent rewrites from kernel.org to a new compromised kernel.
Can FTP affected by this?
My backups consist of web design work, and that's basicly it. I have a rolling backup on a CDRW and it works great.
Until you realise all those annoying things like ICQ contact lists, saved games, bookmarks, and config settings all get lost.
So I take it I cant keep my personal record of archived posts on certain newsgroups over the past few years because you didnt mean them to be archived.
Even countries withoput a histroy of blowung up nuclear plants (UK for example), there is the question of what to do with the waste. Canty bury it, it gets in the water supply, even with loads of lining. Cant dump it in the irish sea.
YOu dont get points do you
in the UK tickets are less then £100, but you get 3 points on your licence. 12 points in 3 years and you're banned.
At least in the UK, you dont have to be an electrition to wire anything you'll find in the home.
I'd wait until you get the keys before putting in wiring though - perhaps ask the builders to put in a nice big cable duct system.
If you spend $100,000 on a house, whats wrong with adding another $500 for wiring (and $1500 for a 52" tv ;) - doesnt make much of a difference in the long run.
We have 20m runs of svideo at the uni tv station no problem. If you're more interested in length though we've done 100+m runs of high quality microphone cable (for video, £1.40 a metre), and 5-m+ runs of cheap (15p/metre) common tv cable with a couple of bnc or composite ends stuck on.
We have a 300m rj6 crap quality cable with 2 20db boosters and a high output on the VTR at the start and another booster at the end (before a proper industry booster and splitter with another 200m run from there).
If you need more then a 50m (150 foot) single run in your new house I'm envious.
However its all very well dropping in whatever cables you need, think about how you are going to use them - do you really want them all arriving in your basement? Drop a lot more cable down to your living room, just in case.
Might be worthwhile sticking some cheap speaker wire or 2 core mains flex down there too - if you need a signal.
And finaly, whatever you come up with, double it. A video signal to each room is fine, until you want a tv in there, and a camera.
On the other hand, Windows95 systems have many more capabilities and require actual human beings to troubleshoot and whatnot.
If only human beings had programmed it...
Yep, and you've just saved a mans life, are you really bothered about the $100 ticket?
However how about when the idiot behind you pulls in 3 inches from your rear bumper - you speed up to the limit + 5 to get away and you get fined. Great.
Do they teach you how to get first post?!
What self respecting geek *doesnt* know slashdots IP?
Or at least a few nameservers, or a telnetable ip with dns resolving on.
It is very rare I dont get a full signal, indoors or outdoors, in a car, in a tunnel etc. Anywhere in the UK - be it a field in shropshire or the tower bridge.
The only place I have noticed my lack of signal, in the last 4 years, was in a gully with walls arround me, a near steep ice slope above & below me, and behind me about 500m to another hill.
When I got to the top I had a signal perfectly again.
Finally
I've just read every +2 post there is (8:15AM GMT 26/11), only one mentioned diplomacy, and that was in passing.
It is impossible to play a game of freeciv without diplomacy. I dont care if its as complex as civ 3's, or as rudimentry as the originals, if I cant make peace with my neighbour its not civilization, as my empire is not civilized. Even the mongols and huns didnt attack some empires, partly for their own survival. In freeciv you cant, you have no choice, its basicly a bloodlust.
I've played games of civ where I've never built an attacking unit until I roll out 30+ armors in one go, use my rail network to get them to the enemy lines, and take over the empire in an extremely speedy way (10 turns later and I've conquered almost africa and europe from aisa.
Without diplomacy, freeciv is only a curiosity.
The declaration doesnt hold true for many laws in the US, and other countries.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
[uk anti terrorism arbitrary detention of suspects for 5 years with no evidence or appeal]
Article 11.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
[dimitry wassit - wasnt a crime where he commited the act, not sure if this applies]
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
[any media, including the internet, receive and impart information and ideas, including how to play a dvd without sing proprietry software]
Rugby is kind of like American Football, except tough. Theres no pamby helmets, no 5 foot thick shoulder pads, no 3 minutes breaks every 3 seconds. etc. etc. Just a pure blood bath.
Appently you can get satelistse that read your licence plate - optics are that good now!
Really? I'm looking at laser systems for broadcasting the campus TV to different buildings. http://www.canon-europa.com/products/network_produ cts/canobeam came up on my search, the network version operates up to 622Mbps, upto 1000m [depending on weather], or 156MBps upto 2000m. It works at 785nm (+-15).
Actually they can, just put a receiver in the beam :)
You'll notice it though, unless the receiver was small enough (a few cm's), and near the destination, to only get a small amount of the beam (which diverges by a lot at these distances). The intensity would be lowe rat the destination, but with a small enough bug it would be possible. The bug would have to be very sensitive though!
The Hindenburg was hygrongen filled wasnt it?